Text Link Usability to Keep People Longer

Noisy, ugly, confusing pages scare people away. Easy-to-read and use pages keep people longer.

Ever seen a page with more links than sand in the Sahara? And to make it worse, have you seen such a page with multi-colored super-bright links that make the page look like Lite-Brite?

Unusable and scary!

Two basic guidelines to good colors for text links are as follows:

1 – Keep links underlined. It’s what people expect.  Do not get fancy and bold them; use above lines or dotted lines

2 – Choose a color that’s slightly brighter or richer in color than the copy that surrounds it. This is enough to make it clearly different than the text around it but not drastic enough to distract readers visually.

On the Web, the underlining is reserved for links. Don’t underline copy on your pages that are not links. It only confuses me.

Here’s an example.

The job of your website is to educate, inform and motivate your prospects. Your links should lead them along simply, smoothly, and intuitively.